Made Men (5 page)

This is the work of David Chase, who grew up a few miles away in nearby Caldwell, New Jersey, under the name DeCesare. He is filming a pilot for a new television show he has dreamed up about a Mafia family from New Jersey. His is a different spin on the usual Mafia shtick. He sees real people doing real-people things, such as worrying about which college their daughter will get into or complaining about the price of gasoline. In between, these real people belong to a secret society of killers who pledge total allegiance to their “thing” and promise to shoot or, if that’s not possible, beat to death anyone who informs on their secret. The project does not yet have a title, but film crews have been dispatched with camcorders throughout the streets of northern New Jersey scouting locales. Authenticity is paramount. In fact, authenticity is already causing the show many problems. Chase wants to make sure the characters are not portrayed as either too good or too bad. He wants his protagonist, Anthony Soprano, a capo in a New Jersey crime family, to be sympathetic, but also to be willing to break someone’s head with a baseball bat. He has built Centranni’s in the heart of Elizabeth because that is where Tony will hold court. As a result of all this authenticity, the major networks have taken a pass on Chase’s project. He is in talks with HBO-TV about working a deal, and in the end, it will be said that authenticity was very important to his idea.

Just a few blocks away from the pretend Mafia pork store, Centranni’s, there is a real pork stork called Sacco’s. Inside Sacco’s there are no plastic chickens. Pigs and sausages hanging on hooks are real. In Chase’s yet-to-benamed television show, Uncle Junior is a hard old nut of a man who will sit at a table near the back of the fake pork store, and the other members of his TV Mafia family will come to him for favors and advice. He gives orders. He plots murders. He is a king.

His little kingdom is also remarkably similar to the real pork store a few blocks away from the TV pork store. In Sacco’s, the seasoned gangster is named Joseph Giacobbe, who is known as Uncle Joe. He is a hard old nut of a man who comes to the store every morning for coffee and a roll. The FBI sees him come and go so much they scribble in their notebook, “Giacobbe and other members of the DeCavalcante family regularly hold meetings inside Sacco’s.” If you call Sacco’s on any given morning and ask simply for Joe, Giacobbe will come to the phone.

longshoreman image. It was no longer just a traditional Italian neighborhood where outsiders were considered a form of infectious disease. Into this insular neighborhood in the early 1990s had come an invading army dressed all in black. They were artists, people who made a living with their hands but not in the same manner as the people of Red Hook. Most of the old shipbuilding factories down by the water were long gone, and the sons and daughters of the men who built the ships of World War II were left scrambling for a new way to get by. Now came the artists, fleeing absurd Manhattan rents for cheap space on Smith Street. They opened galleries and shops and restaurants catering to young hip people of modest means. They changed Red Hook’s neighborhood for good.

Joe Pitts—who was as much a part of the neighborhood as the cracks in the sidewalks—was now beginning to stand out. His notorious social club, the One Over Golf Club, hidden behind tinted black windows and a gate that was always shuttered, had become a relic. Perhaps he knew it. Most likely he did not. He lived in Carroll Gardens, but if you asked him, he’d say he lived in Red Hook. Red Hook was where he came from. It was part of his DNA. It was a place he could understand.

Red Hook back in 1973 was to gangland what New Orleans was to jazz, a rough waterfront neighborhood where much gangster lore originated. From Red Hook came Crazy Joey Gallo, who kept a scrawny half-sized lion in the basement of a tenement on President Street. This was the Joey Gallo who spent hours watching old gangster movies of Paul Muni and Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, and learned to imitate their body language. Years later, a Hollywood actor would come to Brooklyn and meet with Joey, who would let the clueless thespian in on how to walk and talk like a “real” gangster, without revealing that he himself was just a sucker for the silver screen. It was art imitating life imitating art.

In the Red Hook of 1973, Joe Pitts had been somebody. He was a known soldier in the crime family of Carlo Gambino. He was a made guy. You couldn’t raise a hand to him without getting permission from the bosses. He made money just by walking into a business and declaring himself partner. To some, his story rivaled Crazy Joey Gallo’s, mostly because no one believed half the things that were said about Gallo. The story that went along with Joe Pitts was hard to believe, but had a basis in truth. Because after it happened, Joe Pitts had to spend the rest of his days in a wheelchair.

At the time, back in 1973, Joe Pitts was forty-two years old. His partner was one of Joey Gallo’s distant cousins, Jimmy Gallo, a DeCavalcante soldier. Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo were looking for a Brooklyn gambler named Vincent Ensulo. Ensulo had borrowed $1,200 and within a week owed $1,600, but that’s not why they wanted him. Gallo and Joe Pitts had learned that Ensulo had begun secretly cooperating with law enforcement. Both men were extremely interested in finding Ensulo, and on a particular day they just happened to see him driving out of a gas station in Red Hook. They jumped into action, pulling open both doors of Ensulo’s slowly moving car. Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo jumped inside the car, one on each side. They both drew guns and pointed them at Ensulo. Joe Pitts, who was at the wheel, began to drive away.

Within three blocks, Ensulo, who was either insane or so crazed with fear he didn’t know what he was doing, suddenly jerked the wheel away from Joe Pitts. Immediately both Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo began firing their weapons, temporarily forgetting that there were three large men jammed inside the front seat of a moving sedan. Joe Pitts, or “Mr. Conigliaro,” as the
New York Times
would later call him, shot Jimmy Gallo once in the left side. Jimmy Gallo (“Mr. Gallo”) shot Joe Pitts twice in the right shoulder. The temporarily lucky Vincent Ensulo suffered only minor wounds, which allowed him to jump out of the car and flee into the Brooklyn night. Jimmy Gallo survived his wounds more or less unscathed, but Joe Pitts was partially paralyzed forever.

Both men were charged with shooting each other, and both pleaded guilty to weapons charges. Joe Pitts did his time in a wheelchair. When Gallo got out of prison, the FBI says, it took only a few days before Vincent Ensulo’s body was discovered with one bullet in the head. Jimmy Gallo was later charged, but he was acquitted. He was later heard bragging about the time he “beat the system” when he “shot a rat and got away with it.”

In the years that followed, Joe Pitts and Jimmy Gallo remained partners and pals, running a loan-sharking business out of John’s Luncheonette in Red Hook well into the 1980s. But times changed. In 1972, Joey Gallo was gunned down at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. He had spent the evening at the Copacabana with the actor Jerry Orbach, who was about to play a version of Joey in the movie
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

The apartment building where Joey kept his lion had been demolished and replaced by subsidized senior housing with a sign,
KEEP CHILDREN AND PETS OFF THE GRASS
. By 1998, Crazy Joey Gallo wouldn’t have recognized the neighborhood he had once ruled.

He certainly wouldn’t have recognized Joe Pitts. By 1998, Joe Pitts was a bitter old man trapped in a wheelchair. He was sixty-seven years old and had been demoted from soldier to mere “associate” in the Gambino crime family by infuriating nearly everyone he came in contact with. He was now viewed by many of his peers as a washed-up, 210-pound tough old bastard who bled his victims dry. Joe Pitts the made guy wasn’t what he used to be.

At this hour, as Joe drove down Smith Street toward the Gowanus Canal, few artists in black could be seen walking the rain-soaked streets. It was too early. He was alone in his Caddy. He had a nasty German shepherd that he kept in the One Over Golf Club. The dog accompanied him everywhere and barked and snapped at the invading yuppies. Joe Pitts would laugh when the dog did this. Everybody debated who was worse—Joe Pitts or his dog. On this night he intended to collect some money he decided to leave the dog behind.

It was all arranged.
He had put himself on the books of a struggling company called T&M Construction. T&M was owned by a would-be wiseguy named Mike. He was a source of regular cash for Joe Pitts. The arrangement was simple. Pitts would come by T&M and Mike would hand over a fat envelope of cash. In return, Joe Pitts would “protect” him from being shaken down by other gangsters. Mike hated Joe Pitts. Lately Joe Pitts had been stopping by more often, insisting that the fat envelopes be even fatter, and Mike was getting very tired of this.
Joe Pitts pulled up to Mike’s apartment on Smith Street. Mike dashed through the rain to the Caddy. Sitting in the front seat, he told Joe Pitts there was a guy waiting with the money at Joe’s social club, the One Over. They drove the few blocks to the club and Joe Pitts pulled up to the curb.
A guy called Marty Lewis came out of the club by himself. He was not the guy Mike had said would be there, but he was a guy Joe Pitts knew. Marty was a guy known to other guys. He had driven around with Joe Pitts hundreds of times and pushed him in his wheelchair when the old man needed pushing. He was wearing gloves in the rainy winter night, and he jumped in the backseat. Marty Lewis said the guy with the money was waiting just a few blocks away, but Mike said he couldn’t go because he needed to get back to his apartment. Joe Pitts drove him home and dropped Mike off.
Lewis got in the front seat and told Joe Pitts the guy with the money was waiting on Lorraine Street.
Lorraine Street was down near the Gowanus highway overpass next to a bedraggled housing project. There were auto-body shops and garbage-clotted empty lots. Most New Yorkers would hear they were supposed to meet somebody on a winter night in the rainy darkness on Lorraine Street and they would drive quickly away, never to return.
Not Joe Pitts.
Joe Pitts had grown up in this neighborhood and feared no one, even from his wheelchair.
Joe Pitts drove through the quiet residential brownstone neighborhood with its pizza shops and Italian pork stores and yuppie boutiques south on Court. The farther south he drove, the more uncivilized his neighborhood became.
By the time he passed under the Gowanus Expressway, Joe Pitts had crossed over into another world. Gone were the orderly brownstones with flower boxes and kids on bikes. Now there was razor-wire fences and pocked streets and dangerous alleyways. Here, packs of dogs ran leashless through empty lots. Marty Lewis told Pitts to pull up to the curb on Lorraine Street past the highway overpass. This was where the guy with the money was supposed to be. Joe Pitts could not see the guy with the money anywhere in the rain and the dark, but he pulled over anyway.
Marty Lewis took off one glove as he opened the passenger door and stepped out of the car. Rain thrummed on the windshield.
Marty stood up outside the car, turned around, and leaned back in the Caddy. He had a revolver in his hand pointed at Joe’s head and he squeezed off six shots. Five entered Joe Pitts. Bullets entered Joe Pitts’s face, his right arm, his torso, and his right lung.
“I can’t believe it was you,” Joe Pitts grunted. “Motherfucker.”
Lewis stepped back, perhaps surprised by the fact that Joe Pitts was still talking. But Joe Pitts wasn’t just talking— he was driving. He put the car in drive and drove slowly away from the curb. The door shut as he accelerated, and when he got to the corner, Joe Pitts, nearly seventy years old, with five bullets in his body, clicked on his turn signal.
Marty Lewis stood on the corner with the rain pounding down, watching the red light of that turn signal click on and off in the darkness. On and off, on and off. Marty Lewis almost had a heart attack on the spot as Joe Pitts drove away.
Carrying five bullets, Joe Pitts not only managed to obey all traffic laws, but he somehow was able to navigate his huge automobile back to his social club on Court Street, bleeding all over the upholstery. Somehow he managed to get one of his cohorts, a big three-hundred-pound DeCavalcante associate, who lived in an apartment above the club, to come down to the car.
The three-hundred-pound associate drove Pitts the seven blocks under the IND subway el tracks, over the foul waters of the Gowanus Canal, and right up to the emergency entrance of Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. They arrived at 6:17
P
.
M
., and Pitts was placed on a gurney, where he remained for the next four hours, waiting for surgery.
Because he had been shot, the police from the Seventyeighth Precinct were summoned. A detective asked Joe Pitts what happened. He said a black man from the Red Hook housing projects shot him. Clearly it was his intention to distract law enforcement while he took care of business himself. Clearly he believed he would survive to take care of business.
At 10:22
P
.
M
., Joe Pitts was still waiting when he had a heart attack and died.